IN LUST WE TRUST: 8MM FILMS BY THE KUCHAR BROTHERS
PROGRAMME 1
Friday 31 March 2006, at 6:30pm
London Lesbian & Gay Film Festival at BFI Southbank

SYLVIA’S PROMISE
George Kuchar, USA, 1962, 8mm on 16mm, colour, sound, 9 min
‘Love comes in all sizes. But the bonds of love extract a terrible price to be paid in flesh. A vow weighs heavily on the heart. Sylvia makes a promise but can she keep it ?’ (George Kuchar)

BORN OF THE WIND
Mike Kuchar, USA, 1962, 8mm on 16mm, colour, sound, 24 min
Donna Kerness and Bob Cowan, whose torrid off-screen romance caused a sensation in the steam room of the St. George Hotel, are teamed for the first time in this poignant film of shriveled beauty and bloodless vengeance. Mr. Cowan is a striking performer resembling a vulture with shoestrings on its head. He and the buxom Miss Kerness battle front and center in the biggest clash of the hams since Godzilla and King Kong, and it’s one of the mysteries of gravity that Kerness doesn’t flop on her face, she being so top-heavy.
‘A tender and realistic story of a scientist who falls in love with a mummy he has restored to life … 2,000 years as a mummy couldn’t quench her thirst for love!’ (George Kuchar)

THE THIEF AND THE STRIPPER
George Kuchar, USA, 1959, 8mm on 16mm, colour, sound, 25 min
Three years to complete … It dares to lay bare the naked carcass of a generation gone mad with moral decay. Starring Tony Reynolds and Candy Newman in the film that got them married!
‘An early film, depicting today’s youth … raw and brutal.’ (George Kuchar)

A TOWN CALLED TEMPEST
George Kuchar, USA, 1963, 8mm on 16mm, colour, sound, 33 min
Rarely has the cinema equaled such spectacle! Seldom have movies probed so deeply in the rotten core of hypocrisy and weakness! Only the talents of Larry Leibowitz and Zelda Kaiser, his cousin from Hawaii, could make this tale of hatred and fanaticism come alive from the screen and hit you in the face with truth.
‘What happened that afternoon that left a town in shambles, its people in search of God?’ (George Kuchar)

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IN LUST WE TRUST: 8MM FILMS BY THE KUCHAR BROTHERS
PROGRAMME 2
Sunday 2 April 2006, at 4:15pm
London Lesbian & Gay Film Festival at BFI Southbank

A WOMAN DISTRESSED
George Kuchar, USA, 1962, 8mm on 16mm, colour, sound, 12 min
‘The movie club put out a newsletter and one of my early 8mm films, A Woman Distressed, was the only picture that they ever panned in the pages of their cinematic rag. The film was a brash, reckless, comic-drama about the drug Thalidomide and its deforming effect upon the offspring of a big-city maternity ward. Stories of the horrors caused by the drug were permeating the newspapers at the time and I used the reported material as a basis for the comic-drama (or dramedy as it is now called by prime-time practitioners of the TV medium). ’ (George Kuchar)

NIGHT OF THE BOMB
Mike Kuchar, USA, 1962, 8mm on 16mm, colour, sound, 18 min
Teenage lust and deranged delinquence combine to create a cautionary tale for the ages. The Chernobyl of Comedy!
‘The bomb in Night of the Bomb was a vehicle to use as a spectacular image – people in conflict – otherwise it’s hard to make a narrative if something drastic doesn’t happen.’ (Mike Kuchar)

THE CONFESSIONS OF BABETTE
Mike Kuchar, USA, 1963, 8mm on 16mm, colour, sound, 15 min
Following on the heels of Powell’s Peeping Tom, it almost matches that film classic in progressing truly disturbing psychological horror in contemporary cinema. (www.imdb.com)

ANITA NEEDS ME
George Kuchar, USA, 1963, 8mm on 16mm, colour, sound, 16 min
‘As one man learns of another man’s troubled relationship, he understands how to handle his own troubles at home. The only film to have any dialogue, this tale of tragedy and the scars it leaves on the human psyche is wonderfully told through a voice-over monologue that dives into the deepest shades purple prose.’ (Ryan Sarnowski)
‘All the horrors and guilt of the human mind exposed! It reaches deep into the workings of a woman’s cravings. Your emotions will be squeezed.’ (George Kuchar)

I WAS A TEENAGE RUMPOT
Mike & George Kuchar, USA, 1960, 8mm on 16mm, colour, sound, 10 min
With the birth of I Was A Teenage Rumpot, George and Mike Kuchar stumbled upon something big: their names were Arline, Edie, and Harry. Sensing the tremendous physical potential embedded in this trio’s glands, plans were immediately drawn up to star them in two new films: The Flesh Is Plentiful and Butterball 8. Arline and Harry’s divorce shattered all future films and Arline went on a drunken binge which ended with her head being shaved by a French woman on grounds of ‘husband-stealing’.
‘A documentary about people like you and me, people with a zest for life.’ (George Kuchar)

THE SLASHER
Mike & George Kuchar, USA, 1958, 8mm on 16mm, colour, sound, 21 min
‘An insane killer stalks the grounds of a resort house, bringing sudden violence to those of easy virtue and godlessness.’ (George Kuchar)

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ROBERT NELSON: RAN WITH THE MOVIE CAMERA
5—9 May 2006
International Short Film Festival Oberhausen

Oberhausen 2006: For this special occasion only I have borrowed (appropriated), and personalized with my own initials, the title of an 80 year old silent film masterpiece by Dziga Vertov. When I first saw Man With The Movie Camera, I hadn’t yet dreamed of becoming a filmmaker. It was just a movie that treated my eyes and made me want more. Eye-candy with nourishment. Almost like being able to see music. It made a deep impression. Inspiration not named as such at the time; inspiration in retrospect.

No Method

It shows what can’t be seen
It sounds what can’t be heard

No art
No beauty s
No language of literature
No language of theater
No documentation
No narrative
No story
No message
No script

Step aside
the movie makes itself

“no method” can’t be taught
only discovered
if you’re lucky
and if you’ve paid the price
like ol’ D.V.
Blindfolded in the dark
He hits the nail on the head
Easy*
no problem.

Improv start to finish
not a note missed

—RAN
(the “A” stands for Andrew)
Oberhausen 2006

*“The Creative is always strong, decided, real, hence it meets with no difficulties. It always remains true to itself; hence its effortlessness. [It] shows to men the easy.”
I Ching Wilhelm/Baynes edition

Robert Nelson filmography

1961 Building Muir Beach House (with Gunvor Nelson)
1962 Last Week at Oona’s Bath (with Gunvor Nelson)
          The Mystery of Amelia Air-Heart Solved!
1963 Plastic Haircut (with Ron Davis, Robert Hudson, William T. Wiley & Steve Reich, re-edit 1999 & 2003)
          King Ubu (lost)
1965 Oh Dem Watermelons
          Sixty Lazy Dogs (re-edit 1999, destroyed 2001)
          Confessions of a Black Mother-Succuba
          The Population Explosion Motorcycle Horse (audiotape)
          Thick Pucker (re-edit 1999, destroyed 2002)
1966 Oily Peloso the Pumph Man (re-edit 1999)
1967 Grateful Dead (alternate version 1975)
          Hot Leatherette
          The Great Blondino (with William T. Wiley)
          The Great Blondino Preview (with William T. Wiley)
          The Off-Handed Jape (with William T. Wiley)
          Penny Bright and Jimmy Witherspoon (re-edit 1999)
          Half-Open and Lumpy (re-edit 1999)
          Superspread (re-edit 1999, destroyed 2000)
          The Awful Backlash (with William Allan)
          Portrait of Gourley (re-edit 1999)
1968 The Beard
          War is Hell (with William Allan)
1969 What Do You Talk About ? (videotape, two versions)
1970 Bleu Shut
          R.I.P. (re-edit as Rest in Pieces, 1974 & 2003)
          King David (with Mike Henderson, re-edit 2003)
1971 No-More (re-edit as More, 2000)
1973 Worldly Woman (with Mike Henderson, new soundtrack 2003)
1974 Deep Westurn (with William Geis, Mike Henderson & William T. Wiley)
1976 Special Warning (re-edit 1999)
          Suite California Stops and Passes: Part 1 (re-edit 2003)
1978 Suite California Stops and Passes: Part 2
          Castiac Junction (aka Interesting Cities and Towns)
1979 How To Get Out of a Burning House
1982 Hamlet Act
1986 He Sees Blind Horses and Bad Poetry (destroyed 1999)
1985 Tiger Stymie (re-edit as Curious Native Customs, 1999)
1988 Limitations
1989 199 L. la (videotape)
1997 Hauling Toto Big

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YOU KILLED THE UNDERGROUND FILM
Friday 19 May 2006, at 7:30pm
London The Horse Hospital

Wilhelm Hein, punk pioneer of the German underground, presents You Killed The Underground Film, or The Real Meaning of Kunst Bleibt, Bleibt, a diaristic odyssey that slides from the sublime to the ridiculous, between document and performance. Jack Smith, Nick Zedd and others appear in the film, which transcends nostalgia to become a pure and progressive affirmation of independence. Defiant, didactic and polemical, this sprawling opus is a kick in the teeth for convention.

Hein began filmmaking in the 1960s, with rough collages that were audio-visual assaults on the senses. A true radical, who has resisted become part of the establishment, Wilhelm Hein remains committed to the underground and maintains a subversive practice dedicated to the freedom of expression.

YOU KILLED THE UNDERGROUND FILM, OR THE REAL MEANING OF KUNST BLEIBT, BLEIBT
Wilhelm Hein, Germany, 2002-06, b/w & colour, sound-on-cd, 120 min
“Assembled from over 10 years of footage he shot and collected, Wilhelm Hein’s new film is a fascinating and challenging example of what it means to make politically relevant underground film in an increasingly rented world. The film’s title is partly taken from a text of a performance by Jack Smith at the 1974 Cologne Art Fair that Hein documented and uses here in the film’s prologue. On the soundtrack we hear Smith’s familiar, almost comforting, nasaldrone bemoaning museums, the art market and artists whose images suck the life out of their subjects, and the thinning of art. Images of Hein next to various public sculptures and monuments in Poland, the Ukraine, and Russia accompany parts of Smith’s rant. In this sequence, as in many others (for instance, the witty nod to Andrew Warhola set in Warsaw and scored with A Night In Tunisia), Hein’s unexpected combination of sound and image, of references and citations, calls to mind what might be one of the film’s central concerns: what can underground film tell us about the changes in Eastern Europe over the past 15 years? Hein’s révue-like film demonstrates the relevance of asking the question while offering numerous ways of answering it. The film functions as a burlesque show of aesthetic strategies and possibilities, invoking either directly or indirectly a mix of Hein’s favourites, including Marcel Duchamp, George Grosz, Nick Zedd, Arnold Schoenberg, Derek Jarman, Kurt Kren, Jerry Tartaglia, Samuel Beckett, Pete Seeger, Jack Smith, Andy Warhol and many more. Hein never slips into a mode of irony or cynicism while poignantly and beautifully juxtaposing an earnest humanitarian Michael Jackson song with some re-edited Japanese porn. With his sexy, playful and contemplative film, Hein asks of the underground what Jack Smith asked of Maria Montez: give socialist answers to a rented world!” (Marc Siegel)

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GAMES PEOPLE PLAY
Saturday 28 October 2006, at 2pm
London National Film Theatre NFT3

YOU MADE ME LOVE YOU
Miranda Pennell, UK, 2005, video, colour, sound, 4 min
You Made Me Love You, Pennell’s last film to date, is based on a sort of exercise, a game, in which a cameraman portrays 21 male and female dancers. They are asked to form a queue facing the camera (a very English idea). As with a stationary queue in which people start getting restless, those at the back try to gain a view of the counter, i.e. camera. But the picture is mostly filled by the four or five faces that are nearest to the camera, which block the view of the others. However, the camera does not allow the situation to settle; mounted on rails, it moves, sometimes slowly, then very rapidly, and always surprisingly, to the left or the right. The queue has to follow, which means that the faces that have just filled the picture suddenly disappear, allowing the deeper levels of staging, the dancers who are further away, to be seen. This video is thus shaped by a ‘constant line’, a rigid concept which, through its realisation, creates a lot of movement, overlapping, and surprising revelations. Meanwhile, within the sound track, moments of tense calm alternate with the patter of many bare feet, a noise that is all the more confusing because we never see the feet in the picture. What these 3½ minutes allow us to see instead is a wealth of strangely touching portraits: 21 people ‘making love to the camera’. (Dirk Schaefer, Oberhausen Festival)
www.mirandapennell.com

OLYMPICS 2005 TRACK AND FIELD
Shannon Plumb, USA, 2005, video, colour, sound, 18 min
Shannon Plumb’s new film is based on the summer games of the Olympics. Inspired by Buster Keaton’s College (1927) and Leni Riefenstahl’s 1938 documentary Olympia, Plumb’s sketches include the opening ceremonies and several track and field game sports. Plumb’s films rely on spontaneity and character traits to investigate the possibilities of laughter in our most serious and competitive of sporting events. Through our need to achieve greatness and through the individuality of her characters, Shannon Plumb presents the humour in going for the gold. (Sara Meltzer Gallery)
www.shannonplumb.com

SWEET NIGHTINGALE
Victor Alimpiev, Russia, 2005, video, colour, sound, 7 min
In his video works, Victor Alimpiev combines elements of diverse artistic genres like painting, theatre, dance and music in the moving image. The human ‘material’ that seldom performs as individuals but mostly as a group of people in Alimpiev works, becomes a mouldable ‘mass’ formed to a living sculpture, which reacts to its surrounding space. The movements of the mass in the space are defined by the repetition of monotone gestures, whose function seems familiar, but is subordinated to the dramaturgy of the moving image and are isolated from its context. (Galerie Anita Beckers)

PROPRIO APERTO
Judith Hopf, Natscha Sadr Haghighian & Florian Zeyfang, Germany, 2006, video, colour, sound, 6 min
The artists take the viewer on a stroll through the landscape of Venice Biennale’s Giardini during winter. A voiceover talks about ruined landscapes, ghosts and living in obscurity of cultural hegemony. The work consists of photographs edited in slow pans in which different degrees of obliteration of the pavilions become the central theme of the work. Collaboration is an important aspect of the three artists’ working process. Proprio Aperto is the first collaboration between the three. They all work in a broad variety of media and materials, creating works that often investigate contemporary socio-economic structures. With very simple means they both find and create small poetic slippages in society. (Jørgen Riber Christensen,Nordjyllands Kunstmuseum)

UNTITLED (FOR DAVID GATTEN)
Phil Solomon & Mark LaPore, USA, 2005, video, colour, sound, 5 min
Mark and I made this for our friend David Gatten, as a prayer, an offering, a ‘get well soon’ card … for all three of us. It was made on the last night that I saw Mark, my best friend of 32 years. (Phil Solomon)

BLOCKING
Pablo Marin, Argentina, 2005, 35mm, colour, silent, 3 min
Made strictly by opposing the Association of Moving Image Archivist’s ‘Disaster Recovery for Films in Flooded Areas’, this film was kept under water until its emulsion started to melt, then removed, tightened up and finally dried directly by the sun. The result is what you see, a film trailer, reborn from its very own ashes, in which the few small portions of images that remain are overcome by the freed, colourful chemicals. Blocking is, thus, an homage to all the footage lost by the unpredictable dangers of nature and, at the same time, a true song to the beauty in destruction. (Pablo Marin)

KRISTALL
Matthias Müller & Christophe Girardet, Germany, 2006, 35mm, colour, sound, 15 min
Kristall creates a melodrama inside seemingly claustrophobic cabinets. Like an anonymous viewer, the mirror observes scenes of intimacy. It creates an image within an image, providing a frame for the characters. At the same time it makes them appear disjointed and fragmented. This instrument for self-assurance and narcissistic presentation becomes a powerful opponent that increases the sense of fragility, doubt and loss twofold. (Christoph Girardet & Matthias Müller)

CONTEMPLANDO LA CIUDAD
Angela Reginato, USA, 2005, 16mm, colour, sound, 4 min
Perfectly without affect, a girl sings along with a pop tune, transporting herself through space and time to Mexico City circa 1978. (Angela Reginato)

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DISTANCE AND DISPLACEMENT
Saturday 28 October 2006, at 4pm
London National Film Theatre NFT3

LET THERE BE WHISTLEBLOWERS
Ken Jacobs, USA, 2005, video, b/w, sound, 18 min
A train passes through a tunnel and hurtles on to a station. Time and space is toyed with, things enter an impossible state of on-going movement while going nowhere. The actual tunnel experience sets off a metaphysical one. Composed to the first part of ‘Drumming’ by Steve Reich. (Ken Jacobs)

UNIFINISHED PASSAGES
Brett Kashmere, Canada, 2005, video, b/w, sound, 17 min
This five-part film cycle emphasizes instants, rather than developing situations. Designed using indeterminate loop forms, and organized around themes of dislocation, transition, settlement, modernity and transportation, Unfinished Passages traces my great-grandfather’s journey from London, England to Golden Plains, Saskatchewan at the turn of the 20th century. Using the shadow play of light and darkness as a metaphor for human memory, Unfinished Passages reframes his forced immigration , orphan experience through the developing lens of the cinema. In bringing to light this aspect of my family history I draw upon the language of early cinema, beginning with the straightforward visual simplicity of Lumière demonstration pieces such as Boat Leaving the Harbour (1896) and The Arrival of a Train at the Station (1895), and Birt Acre’s Rough Sea at Dover (1895). The second part, inspired by Georges Méliès, follows the pattern of a dream and, as in a dream its real meaning is displaced and dispersed through associative connections. Part three forms a transitional pivot, seizing on the romanticized image of a moving train as an emblem for cinematic and technological progress. In part four the film proceeds to a more constructive, layered assembly based on the theory and practice of Dziga Vertov. Part five draws on the individual self-expression and open-ended conclusion of Francois Truffaut’s 400 Blows (1959). The reconstruction of my great-grandfather’s passage from Europe to Canada is, at the same time, expressed as a coterminous movement through film history. (Brett Kashmere)
www.brettkashmere.com

THIS IS MY LAND
Ben Rivers, UK, 2006, 16mm, b/w, sound, 14 min
A portrait of Jake Williams, who has lived in the middle of Clashindarroch Forest, Aberdeenshire, for over twenty years. Jake always has a hundred jobs on at any one time, fragmenting them into a system that he says eventually gets them all done some day; an expert mandolin player; a committed permaculturist who never throws anything away in the conventional sense, and has compost heaps going back many, many years. He has a different sense of time to most people in the 21st Century, which is explicitly expressed in his idea for creating hedges by putting up bird feeders. It struck me straight away that there were parallels between our ways of working – I have tried to be as self-reliant as possible and apart from the idea of filmmaking as an industry – Jake’s life and garden are much the same – he can sustain himself from what he grows and so needs little from others. To Jake this isn’t about nostalgia for some treasured pre-electric past, but more, a very real future. (Ben Rivers)

THE OTHER SIDE
Bill Brown, USA, 2006, 16mm, colour, sound, 43 min
Rooted in the true sense of ‘independent’ in voice and image, The Other Side is a personal essay documentary imbued with magical landscapes and searing observations softly spoken during the director’s cinematic trek along the United States-Mexican border. Throughout the 2,000-mile journey, Texas-based filmmaker Bill Brown considers the border as an historical and political geography of aspiration, insecurity, and transition. He talks to undocumented immigrants who have risked their lives to cross the border and to border activists whose politics have put them at odds with the guardians of homeland security. A native Texan who has made several documentary shorts, Brown is a sublime, poetic master of wide-open, in-between spaces, of desert and deserted vistas. The Other Side is a rare chance to discover one of America’s leading new cinematic voices. (Film Society of Lincoln Center)
To describe myself as documentary filmmaker is to own up to a troubled profession, what with its unfortunate aspiring to Truth and Objectivity. I’ve tried to cope with this by personalizing my films, insinuating my own voice and disavowing any pose of authority or conclusiveness. More than that, I’m interested in moving the documentary toward something like a metaphysics of fact, where fact materializes for a moment, only to dissolve into daydreams and melancholy and goose bumps.
I find myself drawn again and again to the same spaces: those wide open in-between spaces; landscapes of abandoned things; border zones and landscapes of transition, whether on the far edges of Las Vegas suburban sprawl, or along the fence line of abandoned missile silos in North Dakota. I’m drawn to the drama of transits and transitions played out on landscapes like these. I find myself drawn to the uncanny, too: UFOs and crop circles and ghost stories. The uncanny short-circuits the conclusiveness of our daily lives, which is something I like about it. I’m not sure if the uncanny has some special access to truth, but the uncanny and the true both are spooky. Both haunt us, hovering close by but just out of reach. (Bill Brown)

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